iD (5 page)

“Every grown-up here has a job,” Amy said. “And dealing with humans is mine.”

“Nobody else can do it?”

“Nobody else can do it.”

José blinked. “
Papi
said it’s because they’re scared of you.”

For a picot-second, Javier saw Portia flicker across Amy’s face. Her smirk rose to the surface like a shark’s dorsal fin and then submerged again, replaced by Amy’s far softer and more reassuring smile. Javier blinked. No. It wasn’t Portia. It was just an expression. Portia – whatever was left of her – was in quarantine. Deep beneath the waves, the old bitch lay dreaming.

“Maybe,” Amy said. “But that doesn’t matter. What matters is whether or not you’re getting new uncles, today. Have your dads said anything about that?”

José shook his head. “No. I don’t think they’re looking for my uncles, any more.” He looped an arm around Javier’s leg. “Can
abuelito
come play?”

Amy stood. “Of course!” She glanced at Javier. “I’ll see you later.”

He watched her vanish into the fog. His grandson hugged his leg as tightly as if it were the trunk of a tree. Javier tousled his hair.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

José looked up at him. “Is she going to eat me?”

“Of course not. Your
abuelita
loves you.” He gestured. “That’s why she built all of this for you.”

His grandson leaned away from his leg and wobbled from right to left like a drunk dancing with a lamppost. “Did she make the animals, too?”

“Some of them. The others were gifts. Test models, for us to report back on.”

“For money?”

“For money.” Javier lifted his grandson into his arms. “Why all the questions?”

“I don’t think the animals like us anymore,” José said.

Javier frowned. “What do you mean? Don’t they play with you like they used to?”

“They play just fine,” the boy said. “But at night, they talk to each other.”

“That’s normal. They’re de-fragging, just like you.”

José shook his head. “No. They come together and they sit down and blink their eyes at each other. The ones Amy made, I mean. Not the other kind. The storebought kind.”

“I’m sure that’s normal,” Javier lied. He hitched the boy higher on his hip. “Which ones, though?
Abuelita
has made a lot of animals for you to play with.”

“The cats,” José said. “The big ones. At night they sit in a circle and blink.”

“That’s not so different from organic cats,” Javier said. “
Abuelita
did a good job copying the real thing.”

The boy looked doubtful. “How would you know?”

“Well…”

Javier considered. Matteo and Ricci had asked him to avoid discussing his own past – too sordid, too dirty, parental discretion advised – but his father’s wasn’t off-limits.

“Your great grandfather, my father, he saw big jungle cats all the time.”

“Real ones?”

“Real ones. One of them took his hand clean off once.”

The boy brightened. All traces of fear vanished from his face. “Did it grow back?”

“It grew back. It took a while, but it grew back.” Javier decided that now was not the time to tell his grandson that Amy had once bitten off his thumb. That grew back, too. “They were able to stop the smoking. He was working on a big crew, then. In the rainforest.”

“With his brothers?”

“Yes. Our clade.”

José hugged him. “We used to be together, once,” he whispered.

“Yes,” Javier whispered back. “Once upon a time.”

 

 

The other vN busied themselves preparing for the shipment. They darted across the thoroughfare, trading clothes and gossip, mugging for their botflies. They wove around Javier as he proceeded toward his own little bud. It floated freely, separated from any arterial by exactly ten feet at all times. He focused on the green arbour marking the entry to his garden, and leapt. Glittering water vanished beneath his outstretched feet. Seconds later, he landed in the fragrant arms of a mango tree. Wrapping his legs around the trunk more completely, he stretched out and plucked one. It was perfectly red and soft. He decided to charge more, then dropped into the cool green shadows below.

His was the only space on the island entirely devoted to organic life. Real trees. Real blossoms. Real dirt. Real mould and real insects and real food. It took him a long time to coax a good permaculture out of the island’s synthetic flesh, but between the deep sea minerals and the algae and the bio-waste he traded interviews for, he’d made fertile soil: dark and damp and loamy. It worked so well, Amy had once asked him if the failsafe would allow him to grow drugs there. He told her it wasn’t worth the headache. Literally.

Instead, he grew food he could neither taste nor consume. There was a big call for exotic things out on the seasteads and pirate ships and barges. Mangos were big. And avocados. Little red bird’s eye chillis and saw-toothed shiso and tingly Sichuan peppercorns. Vanilla: a key ingredient in pirate hooch. Hen-of-the-woods: a luxury for vegans. The stuff Americans used to get shipped up from Mexico or Chile or Thailand or Japan. The things they used to traffic via container ships, before the thing that became the island started eating container ships. Now he grew those things on the skin of the island itself.

He bounced from tree to tree, collecting produce. It was a strange thing, having a job. He used to earn his keep on his knees, not his feet. This was the first time since prison he’d had dirt under his nails.

“Do you need any help?”

Amy waited for him in the next tree. She’d changed into a white cotton dress and an elaborate torque fashioned of press-plastic harvested from the Pacific patch. Artisanal plastic, the seasteader told Javier, when he bought it for her. Eternal. Undying. He’d bought a ring to match it. He had yet to give it to her. She’d probably think it was silly.

“Sure,” Javier brought a mesh string-bag from his back pocket. “Go for it.”

They jumped between the trees, squeezing and plucking. Javier took longer leaps than Amy; she tended to look longer and examine the trees before jumping.

“Are you afraid of hurting them?” he asked.

“Who?”

“The trees.”

She gestured at the greenery surrounding them. “Well, they
are
fairly fragile,” she said. “Besides, it’s your work. I don’t want to ruin your work.”

“You’re not going to
ruin
anything,” he said, swinging between branches. They bent and swayed under his grip, but they didn’t snap and he didn’t slip. “See? They’re tough. Flexible.”

She smiled down at him. “You’re a good gardener.”

“Well thank you kindly, ma’am.”

“No, really. You’ve done so much here, in so little time. It’s really impressive.”

He let his momentum rock him gently on the bough. He was going to ask about the cats in the Veldt. Really, he was. Just not right now. Now he had other things on his mind. “Are you trying to get in my pants? Because that can be arranged.”

Amy shook her head. “Do you think about sex
all
the time?”

“The longer you hold out, the more I think about it.”

He levered himself up, catching the bough with his feet and rising to stand when its bounce calmed some. He proceeded along the length of it, one foot in front of the other. He caught her staring at his feet and smiled. Maybe Amy was a foot person. How delightfully human of her. He jumped for her, pinning her against her own tree – a kallu, the liquor of which fermented in the lifespan of a mayfly – by slipping his arms and legs around it and her.

“So,” he said. “Where were we?”

Amy shut her eyes. She always got so embarrassed. It was charming, in its own way. “I’m sorry about this morning. I didn’t mean to yell at you.”

“You didn’t
yell
. I’ve heard yelling, and that was not yelling.”

“You know what I mean.” Her eyes opened. “I’m sorry I’m not more like… what you want.”

“You’re exactly what I want. That’s what I keep trying to tell you.”

Amy shook her head. “You’ve been with a lot of humans. They had sex with you all the time.”

“You don’t take that as a ringing endorsement of my skills?”

She pressed back against the tree. Shadows glanced across her skin. “I just know you must miss it. And I’m not sure I could even keep up.”

Javier made a show of looking her up and down. “You could keep up.”

“But would you even enjoy it?”

He gave his best smile. She didn’t know how it worked, really. She didn’t know that his own enjoyment was comfortably algorithmic, that it relied entirely on external inputs from the other person’s affect. Indrawn breath. Blushing. Moaning. His orgasms were one big Voight-Kampff test.

“It’s not a contest. You just have to focus on nailing
me
, not nailing
it.
”

Amy stuck her tongue out at him. Javier wasted no time. He darted and kissed her.

When they first started out, she’d kissed like the women she’d watched on dramas in her old life: all demure stillness, letting him lead. Now she kissed more like herself: direct, to the point, sucking his lower lip like his designers had sculpted it specifically for her use. That was the real Amy, not the nervous girl trying to spare him from something she’d never understood. He smiled and moved to her neck.

“This tree is incredibly uncomfortable,” he said, between kisses. “Let’s go home.”

She said nothing. She’d gone completely still.

“Come on, the shipment can–”

Amy reached up and covered his mouth with her fingers. Her eyes had defocused. “It’s not the shipment.”

She slid off the bough, skidded down the tree, and pressed one hand to the ground. Her hand sank beneath the island’s surface. Then her forearm, up to her elbow. She grimaced. It looked as though she were freeing a clog in the island’s plumbing.

He joined her. “What is it?”

Her expression rippled into surprise and delight. “It’s a
submarine
.” She withdrew her hand. Streams of black oil coursed down her fingers and rejoined the earth. “The chimps are trying to look up my
skirt
.”

 

Together, they closed the distance between his garden and the nearest arterial in a single leap. They didn’t even bother running. They bounded. Three feet, five feet, until the dark trees became one black blur. As they ran, the trees grew. Javier heard their leaves rustle as they expanded, thinning, creating cover. They jumped, and Javier saw the diamond tree straight ahead, far at the other end of the thoroughfare. They were running straight for home. All over the island, a mist began to rise.

“Hey, is this shit explosive, too?”

Amy didn’t answer. She pounded down the thoroughfare, running faster and faster, her hands like blades, her knees at a perfect right angle to her hips. She tucked them into her stomach as they sailed over the heads of the other vN. As they cleared the canopy of mist, two other figures joined them.

“Go back to your treehouse, Xavier,” Amy said.

“Sorry, lady,” his oldest, Ignacio, said, “but you’re not our mother and you don’t tell us what to do.”

They dropped into the mist. They jumped again, and Ricci was there, with Gabriel and Léon.

“Hi, Dad,” Léon said.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “You’re iterating.”

“Never stopped you, did it?”

Léon took to the air. Javier followed. Beneath his feet, beneath the mist, the island was changing shape. The arteries folded down onto each other, forming a single black arrowhead. It was the basic defensive posture the island assumed whenever it or Amy perceived a possible threat. The diamond tree loomed large in his vision. Amy sprinted forward. He and the boys stopped short at the beach, but she ran straight across the water. Her feet barely disturbed its surface. She leapt into the tree and landed in its fork, arms raised. Her skin was full of rainbows.

Beneath his feet, the island shuddered.

“You sure know how to pick ’em,” Ignacio said.

Javier bolted for home. He jumped from the beach and landed awkwardly in the water. The membrane caught him and he waded the rest of the way. The water was frustratingly heavy; he felt more tired than he should have by the time he made it to their little island. Amy had slid down the tree by then, and she stood with her back to him. Her fingers twitched angrily at her sides. She and the island were deep in damage control mode.

“What’s going on?” Javier asked.

She answered him with a question: “Above or below?”

“Huh?”

“Above, or below. Pick one. We can go down, or we can bring it up. Where would you like to go?”

His mind simulated several outcomes to both choices. He thought of a hole opening in the island’s flesh and himself sliding down into it. He thought of the weakness of human flesh, and the pressure, and the bends. “How far below was it?”

“Not that far.”

He insinuated himself into her field of vision. “Are there humans on that sub?”

She blinked. “I’m not sure.”

“You could kill them, if you bring them up too fast. If they’ve been too deep for too long. The p-pressure c-could–”

Now it was her turn to kiss him. It was very light and very quick, but it shut him and the failsafe down completely. When his eyes opened, Amy’s smile was all too bright. Her eyes were all too sad. He recognized the expression. She wore it when all the other vN on the island manifested their failsafe. It was pity.

“It’s probably automated,” she was saying. “It’s navigating by algorithm. That’s why I didn’t catch it, sooner.”

He couldn’t help himself. He had to ask. “You’re sure?”

He watched her pity turn to frustration. It displayed as a slight crinkling at the corners of her eyes, an almost imperceptible line between her brows that, unlike those of human women, would never become permanent.